Oculus Rift dev kit can be disassembled in minutes, repaired with ease

You may not be ready to shell out $1500 to walk around with one of Google’s tiny computers strapped to you head, but how do you feel about completely immersing your senses in a video game? It turns out the Oculus Rift is not only quite cool, but the developer kit has proven itself incredibly easy to repair.

We’ve all raged a little after failing a crucial part of a game goes south. Maybe it was the controller spike after the AI got the best of you in a game of Madden, or the roar of frustration after a Handy Man stomped you in Bioshock Infinite. Let’s not forget the projectile-shaped Wiimotes that eventually started coming with safety straps and rubber bumpers. Those moments of frustration end in damaged hardware more often then most people will admit. As long as there aren’t a ton of changes between the developer kit and the finished product, it looks like you’ll be able to repair your Rift pretty quickly, should the worst happen.

Ifixit and their merry band of tool-wielders conducted a thorough investigation of the Oculus Rift developers kit, and found that very little stood in the way of replacing nearly every part in the unit. As we’ve seen before, the 1280×800 display inside the headset is viewable through a pair of special lenses. When you put your Rift on for the first time, you choose between one of three different included lens sized to create the best fit for you. This is done through a large plastic screw on the headset to release the casing, and is one of the reasons the headset is so easy to completely disassemble.

We know that the final version of the Rift headset will offer a higher resolution display and better sensors from our conversation with the developers at CES. Commodity hardware was a big part of the initial design for Rift, in order to keep costs down and make working on the initial builds easier.

The final version will have hardware that is significantly more optimized for Rift, and offer a higher quality experience overall. That hardware will likely be more expensive to replace and more difficult to find. With any luck that doesn’t mean the hardware will be any harder to fix if anything should happen. If you’re one of the many who participated in the Rift’s Kickstarter, at least you know if anything breaks you’ll be good to go.

There’s still no official date for the consumer release of the Oculus Rift, and there have not been any significant updates regarding their production. Right now the company is focusing on developers, and what they can bring to Oculus Rift.